Social Education 71(2), pp 70–74

©2007 National Council for the Social Studies

What Caused the

Great Depression?
Jean Caldwell and Timothy G. O’Driscoll

Economists and historians have struggled for almost 80 years to account “trough”), low prices create an incentive
for the American Great Depression, which began in 1929 and lasted until the early for consumers to buy more, leading the
years of World War II. The depth of this depression was unprecedented; in March, economy into recovery.
1933, more than one quarter of willing workers in the United States were unemployed, Events during the mid-1920s illustrate
and another quarter could find only part-time work. Although conditions improved the high point (“peak”) of a business cycle.
after this low point, high rates of unemployment continued to haunt the economy In these years, there was a great increase
for many years. in the number of Americans who bought
houses, home furnishings, appliances,
Business Cycles and the Great chased the durables that they want and and automobiles. Towns and cities were
Depression have no desire to buy more. At such times, growing rapidly, and state and local gov-
Depressions (or recessions) occur when demand obviously will fall. ernments spent money to provide roads,
there is not enough demand for all the Capital goods are goods such as factory sidewalks, and water and sewage services.
goods and services that an economy pro- buildings, machinery, and equipment. The homes of town dwellers were con-
duces. Inventories of unsold goods build These are goods that are used to produce nected to electricity and telephone ser-
up, and manufacturers cut production other goods. Business firms invest in such vices. Spending by consumers, business
by laying off workers and buying less of goods only when they feel that consum- firms, and state and local governments
the raw materials that they use to make ers will buy what is produced by the new created plentiful, high-paying jobs.
their products. Service providers, from capital goods. When that prospect seems In the late 1920s, demand was begin-
doctors to hair stylists, have fewer clients, doubtful, demand for these goods falls. ning to soften for houses and automo-
and their incomes fall. At some point in the course of a busi- biles. Cities and states had completed
Most economists believe that such ness cycle, most economists believe, most of the efforts they had undertaken
falling demand is a normal part of what demand will reverse. Durable goods to provide services for their citizens. In
is commonly called a “business cycle.” eventually wear out and must be replaced. the summer of 1929, total spending in
Demand for two kinds of goods—durable To supply new goods for consumers the American economy was falling, and
goods and capital goods—tends to fluc- seeking replacements, manufacturers business firms began to cut production.
tuate, and these fluctuations drive the purchase new equipment, rehire work- October’s stock market crash—signal-
cycle. ers, and increase their purchase of raw ing to shareholders that business profits
Durable goods are consumer goods materials. As demand increases, employ- would fall—probably made the recession
that last a long time, such as automo- ment increases. In times of peak demand worse. There was a loss of wealth and, as
biles, appliances, and home furnish- in a given sector of the economy, almost a result, people spent less, but the crash
ings. Demand for such goods increases every potential worker who wants a job did not cause the recession.
when consumers are feeling prosperous; can find one. At first, most observers thought that
it falls when they are not feeling pros- There is also a price dimension to the the recession would be temporary. Stock
perous. Many economists also believe business cycle. When demand is increas- prices began to rise again, and the unem-
that durable goods markets can be “satu- ing, prices tend to rise; but when demand ployed, aided by local and private chari-
rated”—that there are, in other words, is falling, prices normally go down, too. ties, were assured that “Prosperity is just
times when most consumers have pur- At the low point of the business cycle (the around the corner”—that is, the down-

Social Education
70

ward trend of the business cycle would
hit bottom and the economy would start
to recover. But this did not happen. Total
demand stayed low. Business firms con-
tinued to lay off employees, and many
firms went bankrupt. Then, in 1930,
banks began to fail in large numbers,
wiping out the savings of potential buyers
and further lowering demand. State and
local relief funds were soon exhausted,
and many laid-off workers and their
families, who had only recently led com-
fortable lives, now faced hunger and even
homelessness. As the economy worsened,
President Franklin Roosevelt initiated
a series of relief measures, but recovery
under Roosevelt’s New Deal was only
partial. Throughout the 1930s business
activity remained low and unemploy-
ment rates remained high.
Explanations for the Great
Depression
Today there are three major schools
of thought on the causes of the Great
Depression and the long failure of the
American economy to return to full
employment.
• The Keynesian Explanation.
The Great Depression was caused
primarily by a fall in total
demand. The decline in demand
was so severe that adequate
demand could be restored only by
large increases in government
spending.
• The Monetarist Explanation.
The Great Depression may have
originated in a fall in total
demand, but its length and sever-
ity resulted primarily from the
unwillingness of the Federal
Reserve System to prevent bank
failures and to maintain a large
enough money supply.
• The International Explanation.
The American depression was
part of a larger global depression.
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71
At left: A crowd of
depositors gather
in the rain out-
side the Bank of
United States after
its failure in 1931.
(World-Telegram
staff photo/Library
of Congress, Prints
& Photographs
Division, LC-
USZ62-117261)
The depression was particularly
severe in the United States
because the Federal Reserve
System was obligated to follow
the rules of the gold standard.
The Keynesian Explanation
The Keynesian explanation is based
on the theories of John Maynard
Keynes, a British economist who, in
1936, published The General Theory
of Employment, Interest, and Money.
Keynes held that it was possible for total
demand in a modern economy to remain
low indefinitely, leading to long periods of
high unemployment. When workers were
unemployed, they spent very little; and
when business firms saw large numbers of
unemployed workers, they were reluctant
to produce goods that probably would
not be purchased. Businesses, therefore,
cut production, and more workers lost
their jobs. According to Keynes, the
only way to create enough demand to
employ the work force fully was for the

A line of jobless and homeless men wait outside to get free dinner at New York’s
municipal lodging house in the winter of 1932. (AP Photo)
national government to increase spend-
ing radically to compensate for the
decreased spending of consumers and
business firms. Furthermore, the central
banking system (in the United States, the
Federal Reserve System) should create
new money for the national government
to borrow and spend. Rather than rais-
ing taxes, the government should take
steps to create a deficit by cutting taxes,
increasing spending, or some combina-
tion. The Hoover administration did
just the reverse. In 1932, the federal
government raised taxes drastically to
reduce the budget deficit resulting from
the depression.
Previously, mainstream economists
(generally referred to now as “classical”
economists) had held that, if demand
for products fell, the demand of busi-
ness firms for money to finance new pro-
duction would also fall. When demand
for loans fell, interest rates would go
down. According to the accepted eco-
nomic theory, lower interest rates would
encourage business firms to borrow more
and increase production, which, in turn,
would employ more workers. An increase
in the number of employed workers
would mean more consumer spending,
which would make increased government
spending unnecessary.
The length of the Great Depression
in the United States seemed to con-
firm Keynesian theory. Unemployment
remained high throughout the 1930s;
the unemployment rate was 14.6 percent
in 1940. Under Roosevelt, government
spending did increase, but by far too
little to achieve full employment. Only
when the American government began
to increase spending in preparation for
World War II did unemployment begin
to fall to normal levels. In light of these
developments, the Keynesian explana-
tion of the Great Depression was increas-
ingly accepted by economists, historians,
and politicians.
The Monetarist View
In 1963, a new book challenged the
Keynesian viewpoint. In A Monetary
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72
History of the United States, Milton
Friedman and Anna Schwartz contended
that actions taken by the Federal Reserve
System both caused and perpetuated the
depression. The Federal Reserve System
raised interest rates in early 1928, which
discouraged business borrowing and
spending and brought about the decline
in production that began that summer.
Interest rates were raised again in 1930
and 1931.
Furthermore, when banks began to
fail in large numbers at the end of 1930,
the Federal Reserve System did little to
assist them. The Federal Reserve System
had been established by Congress in
1913 for the express purpose of prevent-
ing bank failure caused by a “run” on
the bank. A run occurred when many
customers withdrew all their deposits
in the form of cash, forcing the bank to
close when all its cash was depleted. In
such cases, Federal Reserve Banks were
to supply banks with enough cash to meet
the demands of their customers, thus
preventing bank failure. But, according
to Friedman and Schwartz, the Federal
Reserve Banks in the 1930s refused to
support banks that they thought were
unlikely to repay them, forcing many
basically sound banks into bankruptcy.
When a bank fails, its deposits can no
longer be spent; as a result, the amount
of money circulating in society goes
down, depressing demand for goods
and services.
The Great Depression lasted for a
long time, according to the monetarists
(Friedman and his followers), because
bankers were reluctant to make new
loans after 1933. Bankers made only
the safest and most conservative loans
in these years because they believed
that the Federal Reserve would not
support them if they got into trouble.
Furthermore, as the economy began to
improve in 1936, the Federal Reserve
System actually raised interest rates on
loans, fearing inflation.
The International View
Both the Keynesian and the monetarist
explanations identify the causes of the
Great Depression within the framework
of the American economy. However,
most nations of Europe and several
Latin American and Asian countries
also experienced depressions of vary-
ing severity throughout the later 1920s
and the 1930s. Many of these nations,
most notably Germany, began to slide
into recession in 1928 and 1929, while
the United States economy was still
booming.
In 1992, Barry Eichengreen and
Harold James published Golden Fetters:
The Gold Standard and the Great
Depression, 1919-1932. The authors
placed the blame for the worldwide
depression on the return of European
nations to the gold standard after World
War I. The gold standard, which had
been adopted by most developed nations
during the latter half of the nineteenth
century, was a series of monetary rules
that established fixed rates of exchange
among nations. Each participating nation
agreed to exchange a given amount of
its currency for an ounce of gold. For
example, the United States guaranteed
to exchange $20.67 for an ounce of gold;
Great Britain exchanged £4.86 for each
ounce of gold. This meant that if a British
businessman wanted to buy something
from the United States that had a $100
price tag (for example, 50 pipe wrenches),
he could buy gold worth 100 American
dollars and exchange that gold for the
wrenches. Or, more simply, he could just
buy 100 American dollars at a price of
0.2058 pounds for each dollar. Since
each nation that followed the rules of
the gold standard was willing to exchange
gold for a certain amount of currency,
each nation’s currency had a fixed price
in terms of other currencies.
There was a domestic problem, how-
ever, for nations on the gold standard.
Banks used gold as reserves to back up
the loans they made. When a nation’s
banks lost a lot of reserves to other coun-
tries because of the operations of the gold
standard, those banks had to reduce the
number of loans they made. Since most
of these loans were made to business
firms, businesses then had to cut back
on production, laying off workers and
reducing supply orders. Thus a nation
that lost a large amount of gold reserves
faced lower business activity and higher
unemployment.
The post-World War I gold standard
was, in reality, a gold exchange standard.
Not much new gold was being discovered,
and yet the world economy was growing.
There really wasn’t enough gold to back
the currencies of all the gold-standard
nations. Therefore, the governments of
Great Britain and the United States guar-
anteed to accept the currencies of other
nations under all conditions—they would
never suspend redemption of dollars and
pounds for gold. The foreign exchange
reserves of many nations, therefore, con-
sisted of gold and also of British pounds
and American dollars.
Because a gold standard restrains the
amount of new money that can be cre-
ated and lent, and since great amounts of
money were needed by the combatants in
World War I, those nations temporarily
went off the gold standard. By the mid-
1920s, each nation had resumed exchang-
ing its currency for gold at the same
exchange rates that had existed before
the war. This was a hardship for many
nations, since economic relationships
had changed. Some nations could not
produce as much as they had produced
before the war and found it difficult to
produce enough exports to earn gold to
back their currencies. Hardest hit were
Germany, which had to pay reparations
to the nations that had won the war, and
the new nations formed after the break-
up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Problems with the gold standard first
appeared in Austria, in May 1931, with
the failure of that nation’s largest bank,
the Credit-Anstalt. Rumors that the bank
was in trouble caused both foreign and
domestic customers to demand their
deposits in the form of Austrian currency,
which they then exchanged for the gold
reserves of the Austrian government.
Gold, pounds, and dollars flowed out
of the country for more than a month.
Austrian banks did not have a basis for
making new loans or renewing old ones,
and this situation led to business failures
and increasing unemployment. Finally
the Austrian government stopped hon-
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73
oring its commitments under the gold
standard. Deposits owned by foreign
customers were frozen, and Austrian
citizens were strongly discouraged from
removing their funds from the bank.
Panic spread then, and depositors
began runs on banks in other countries.
Other central European nations soon
followed Austria’s example. Germany
froze gold exchanges, and in September,
Great Britain officially left the gold stan-
dard. Foreign depositors quickly began
making withdrawals from United States
banks, fearing that the United States, too,
would “close the gold window.”
Most of the actions of the American
Federal Reserve System from 1931 to
1933 can be traced to its adherence to
the rules of the gold standard. Instead
of abandoning those rules, as had most
other countries, the Federal Reserve
raised interest rates to attract foreign
depositors. The increased rates did,
in fact, temporarily stop the gold flow
out of the country, but of course they
also discouraged borrowing, leading
to more business failures and more job
losses. Banks failed, too, when they
could not collect on loans they had made.
Only after the newly elected Franklin
Roosevelt abandoned the gold standard
did recovery begin.
Monetarists have argued that the
Federal Reserve System should not have
raised interest rates to stop the outflow
of gold. But other economists point out
that only Congress and the president
had the authority to abandon the gold
standard. Only after Roosevelt substan-
tially altered the rules of the gold stan-
dard did economic recovery begin. The
Emergency Banking Act of 1933 gave the
president power over foreign exchange.
Roosevelt quickly prohibited Americans
from owning gold, and he devalued the
dollar; in effect, the United States was
no longer committed to following the
rules of the gold standard.
Conclusion
Apart from the events and policies cited
in the three interpretations discussed
above, a number of other factors contrib-
uted to the causes and continuation of the
Great Depression. The Smoot-Hawley
Tariff, for example, reduced imports, but
also exports. Both President Hoover and
President Roosevelt instituted policies to
keep prices and wages from falling, not
realizing that such policies had the effect
of preventing the economy from adjusting
to change. Economic research continues
to add to our body of knowledge about
the Great Depression, even as many
questions remain. An excellent source
for the new research and opinion on this
topic is Gene Smiley’s Rethinking the
Great Depression, published in 2002.*
We believe that teachers will find that
presenting the approaches described in
this article is a useful way of encourag-
ing students to review and analyze the
causes and progression of the Great
Depression. Teachers might combine the
elements of each approach in a single
broad-based presentation introducing
the Great Depression to their classes, or
else outline the different approaches and
ask students what each approach seems
to explain best or explain least about the
Depression. Students can consider: would
the Depression have been just another
low point in a business cycle, or at least
have been less prolonged and devastat-
ing, if the government had increased its
spending? Or if the Federal Reserve had
prevented bank failures and maintained
a larger money supply? Or if there had
been no gold standard? By examining the
known historical facts and developing
their own interpretations, students can
further their understanding both of the
history of the Great Depression and of
some basic principles of economics.
Jean Caldwell is Professor Emerita at the
University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond.
Timothy G. O’Driscoll is director of the Cen-
ter for Economic Education at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
*Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002
Social Education
74
There are two inserts in the center of this
issue. The first insert consists of twelve
pages and includes two lesson plans, the
first of which accompanies the preced-
ing article, and is titled “Whatdunnit? The
Great Depression Mystery.” The second
lesson plan, “The U.S. Constitution: Rules
of the Game,” complements the opening
article of this issue.
The second insert, placed by the
American Bar Association, announces
the upcoming Law Day (May 1, 2007), and
provides a Law Day fact sheet, answers to
questions, and classroom ideas for readers
of Social Education.
Both inserts are also pull-outs.